[URBAN NOTE] Ten city links: Montréal, Lac-Mégantic, Halifax, Calgary, Edmonton …

• Tracey Lindeman writes at CityLab about how Montréal is trying to keep the redevelopment of the Molson-Coors Brewery site from killing the Centre-Sud.
• In the Montréal neighbourhood of Park-Extension, evictions–renovictions, even–are on the rise. Global News reports.
• Lac-Mégantic now has a train depot that bypasses the heart of this traumatized community. CBC Montreal reports.
• Halifax is now celebrating the Mosaic Festival, celebrating its diversity. Global News reports.
• Jill Croteau reports for Global News about Club Carousel, an underground club in Calgary that played a vital role in that city’s LGBTQ history.
• This business plan, aiming to bypass long lineups at the Edmonton outpost of the Jollibee chain, is ingenious. Global News reports.
• The Iowa town of Pacific Junction, already staggering, may never recover from a recent bout of devastating flooding. VICE reports.
• Avery Gregurich writes for CityLab about the Illinois town of Atlas, a crossroads seemingly on the verge of disappearing from Google Maps.
• The proposal for Metropica, a new sort of suburb in Florida, certainly looks interesting. VICE reports.
• Guardian Cities shares a cartoon looking affectionately at Lisbon.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait argues that the new American plan to put people on the Moon in 2024 is unlikely to succeed in that timeframe.
• The Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly considers whether or not women should travel alone, for safety reasons. (That choice is one I’ve not had to make myself, thanks to my male privilege; I’m very sorry others have to consider this.)
• Centauri Dreams shares the thinking of Gregory Benford on Lurkers, self-replicating probes produced by another civilization not signaling their existence to Earth.
• Maria Farrell at Crooked Timber argues that policy-making these days is often fundamentally ill-conceived, closing off possibilities for the future.
• The Crux notes the remarkable powers of beet juice, as a tonic for athletes for instance.
• D-Brief looks at the slot canyons of Titan, bearing similarities in structure and perhaps origin to like structures in Utah.
• Andrew LePage at Drew Ex Machina, celebrating five years of blogging, links to his ten most popular posts.
• Gizmodo notes the creation for a list of nearly two thousand nearby stars that the TESS planet-hunter might target for a search for Earth-like worlds.
• Joe. My. God. notes that the Austrian president has confirmed the New Zealand shooter has made a financial donation to a far-right group in Austria.
• JSTOR Daily looks at Inge Lehmann, the scientist who determined the nature of the inner core of the Earth.
• Language Hat reports on a new scholarly publication, hundreds of pages long, gathering together the curses and profanities of the Middle East and North Africa.
• Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money does not seem impressed by the argument of Mike Lee that pronatalism is a good response to global warming.
• The Map Room Blog notes the impressive maps of Priscilla Spencer, created for fantasy books.
• Marginal Revolution links to a paper that examines the positions of Jews in the economies of eastern Europe, as a “rural service minority”.
• The Russian Demographics Blog links to a paper noting the ways in which increased human development has, and has not, led to convergence in family structures around the world.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel explains how, despite the expanding universe, we can still see very distant points.
• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps reports on the recent mistakes made by Google Maps in Japan.
• Yorkshire Ranter Alexander Harrowell explains why the United Kingdom, after Brexit, does not automatically become a member of the European Economic Area.
• Arnold Zwicky takes a look at the different factors, often unrecognized, going onto the formation of nonsense names, like those of the characters from Lilo and Stitch.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Socialist Modernism, capping highways, desert cities, Amazon, Google

• Guardian Cities introduces readers to the Socialist Moderism Instagram account, part of a project by Romania’s Bureau for Art and Urban Research to preserve records of Eastern Bloc architecture.
• Brian Martucci at Oxy writes about how many American communities are capping their highways, burying them underground, and in so doing restoring neighbourhoods split by mid-20th century construction.
• This beautiful long-form essay at Lithub by Saritha Ramakrishna, looking at her childhood in Phoenix, imagines what futures will be available to the United States’ desert cities in the foreseeable future.
• Matt Taylor at VICE notes that non-rich people face being driven out of major cities and that initiatives like wooing Amazon will only make things worse.
• Via the Map Room Blog, I found Jack Nicas’ New York Times article noting how Google Maps is not only renaming old neighbourhoods and creating new ones, but that these labels now stick.

[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait looks at enormous, explosive Wolf-Rayet stars, and at WR 124 in particular.
• The Big Picture shares heart-rending photos of Rohingya refugees fleeing Burma.
• Centauri Dreams considers the potential of near-future robotic asteroid mining.
• D-Brief notes the discovery of vast cave systems on the Moon, potential homes for settlers.
• Hornet Stories exposes young children to Madonna’s hit songs and videos of the 1980s. She still has it.
• Inkfish notes that a beluga raised in captivity among dolphins has picked up elements of their speech.
• Language Hat notes a dubious claim that a stelae containing Luwian hieroglyphic script, from ancient Anatolia, has been translated.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money considers the question of preserving brutalist buildings.
• The LRB Blog considers how Brexit, intended to enhance British sovereignty and power, will weaken both.
• The Map Room Blog notes that the moons and planets of the solar system have been added to Google Maps.
• The NYR Daily considers how the Burmese government is carefully creating a case for Rohingya genocide.
• The Power and Money’s Noel Maurer concludes, regretfully, that the market for suborbital travel is just not there.
• Visiting a shrimp festival in Louisiana, Roads and Kingdoms considers how the fisheries work with the oil industry (or not).
• Towleroad reports on the apparent abduction in Chechnya of singer Zelimkhan Bakayev, part of the anti-gay pogrom there.
• Window on Eurasia notes that rebuilding Kaliningrad as a Russian military outpost will be expensive.